OSTI's current services accelerate science through what is largely a kind of card file. We point people to particular pieces of literature or data that meet certain search criteria. From there, people can build on what those pieces of information tell them and achieve new discoveries and inventions.

The success of Google has been so profound that the word “Google” is now considered a verb. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb) “To Google” has come to mean to search the web via the free search engine provided by Google, Inc. The adjective derived from the verb “Google” is “Googleable.” Similarly, the antonym of “Googleable” is “non-Googleable,” which turns out to be an especially useful word. For most practical purposes, the term “non-Googleable” is synonymous with the phrase “deep web.” The major difference between the word and the phrase in a world where Google, Inc., is the largest capitalized company is that the term non-Googleable is intuitively understood.

Anyway, it is generally acknowledged among students of the web that the bulk of the information in it is non-Googleable, a fact which typically comes as a surprise to people who do not study the web. In particular, the information residing in databases is often non-Googleable, and it often happens that scieintific and technical information resides in databases of documents.

The notion that science progresses only if knowledge is shared is the reason that OSTI wascreated in 1947. Documents sent to and from President Franklin Roosevelt near the end of World War II included this rationale for sharing knowledge, and the concept was incorporated into the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 which led to the creation of OSTI.

In recent years the advent of the web has opened up the possibility of sharing knowledge with orders of magnitude more people and making it heretofore unimaginably easier to find and use. The possibility of sharing knowledge faster and better led us to formulate the OSTI Corollary in the mid-2000s: If the sharing of knowledge is accelerated, discovery is accelerated. In mathematical parlance, the Corollary might be considered the time derivative of the concept.

The Corollary seemed rather intuitive to us, but in an attempt to add authority to it, in 2005 we commissioned a rigorous literature search to learn who else in the history of science or knowledge management had stated it. We anticipated that we would be making speeches that said, “According to Professor Muckety-Muck, discovery can be accelerated by accelerating the spread of knowledge.” We were thus surprised when that literature search was unable to find any indication that the thought had been previously pursued or recorded.

We have integrated about ten OSTI products dealing with technical reports, e-prints, patents, conference proceedings, project summaries, etc., so that they are all searchable via s single query. The integrated product allows users to search without first having to decide which OSTI product is likely to have the content he/she seeks. This product is ScienceAccelerator.gov.

We have integrated comparable offerings from about 14 other agencies so that all the virtually combined offerings can be searched via a single query. Science.gov allows users to search without first having to decide which agency offers which content. The DOE contribution to Science.gov is ScienceAccelerator.gov .

We have integrated comparable offerings from about 70 other countries so that all the offerings can be searched via a single query. The US contribution to WorldWideScience.org is Science.gov. WorldWideScience.org allows users to search without first having to decide which country offers which content. The virtual collection is enormous, being comparable in size to science made searchable via Google. Our tests suggest, however, that well over 90% of the content of WorldWideScience is non-Googelable.